Freddie Hart

Country music boasts numerous accounts of overnight success following years of hardship, yet Freddie Hart’s path to prominence stretched exceptionally far, as his chart-topping single “Easy Loving” finally emerged nearly two decades after he first entered the recording studio.

Born Fred Segrest on December 21, 1926, in Loachapoka, Alabama, he grew up as one of fifteen children in an impoverished sharecropper household that often lacked sufficient food yet nurtured a shared passion for music and the Grand Ole Opry. He picked up the guitar at age five and enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps at twelve. By fourteen he had lied about his age to join the Marines, where he saw combat in the Pacific theater throughout World War II. During this period he earned black belts in jujitsu and judo while making his initial public performances by singing in officers’ clubs.

Once discharged, he chose to make country music his livelihood and took the professional name Freddie Hart. With assistance from Wayne Raney and Lefty Frizzell, he secured placements for his earliest compositions and landed a contract with Capitol Records in 1953. During his second session for the label he cut the original composition “Loose Talk,” which Carl Smith later recorded and propelled to the top of the charts. Hart switched to Columbia Records in 1956 and became a regular on the Town Hall Party television broadcast alongside Frizzell, Tex Ritter, Johnny Bond, and additional country performers.

Although his own releases sold modestly during these years, other artists continued to record his material. He began registering modest chart entries in the late fifties and early sixties with tracks such as “The Wall,” “Chain Gang,” and “The Key’s in the Mailbox.” After moving among several labels throughout the sixties, he rejoined Capitol Records in 1970. His initial singles for the imprint again achieved only limited success, prompting the label to drop him. In 1971, however, a disc jockey started spinning “Easy Loving” from the album of the same title; the song rose to number one, captured the Country Music Association Song of the Year honor, and crossed over into the pop Top 40.

Hart quickly followed with a remarkable sequence of stylish, sensual love songs that ascended to the highest positions on the country chart. He maintained this level of achievement well into the seventies and finished the decade among its twenty most successful country hitmakers. As his chart fortunes waned toward the close of the seventies, he departed Capitol for Sunbird Records and scored several additional moderate successes. His last chart entry arrived in 1987, yet he kept performing into the twenty-first century, issuing gospel albums and appearing in venues that included Branson, Missouri. Beyond music, Hart ran a trucking company and established a school for children with disabilities, though country audiences continue to associate him most strongly with his memorable string of tender and seductive country hits from the early and middle seventies. He passed away in 2018 at the age of ninety-one.